بررسی خدمات دولت الکترونیکی مشارکتی؟ ارزیابی های پروژه دولت الکترونیکی Towards Participatory E-Government?: Learning from E-Government Project Evaluations

1 Introduction The government utilizes ICT for several purposes. Naturally, ICT helps in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of executing the internal primary processes within a government organization. For that purpose, government organizations develop their own ICT facilities for their primary and supporting processes, or they purchase those facilities externally. In addition, ICT is essential for a government organization’s contact with other government organizations, businesses and citizens. Finally, ICT often connects the interaction of the outside world with the digitalized processes within the government organization. Therefore, ICT is the enabler of e-Government in all three of these previ‐ ously mentioned domains [7, 30]. E-Government is referred to as the technology-enabled transformation of govern‐ ment, and therefore governments’ best hope to reduce costs, whilst promoting economic development, increasing transparency in government, improving service delivery and public administration, and facilitating the advancement of an information society [35]. The purpose of e-Government is thus to work towards a more effective and more efficient government organization by utilizing new technologies and by involving citizens and businesses and, in doing so, listening to their needs [8, 20]. Citizens are therefore ‘agents’, so to speak, who, together with government repre‐ sentatives, and even together with business representatives, shape the services and processes of the government. This is in line with the principles of New Public Gover‐ nance (NPG), in which the government is seen as part of a large and synchronized network of parties within society as a whole. It is essential that the interface between society and the total government system works properly, both for the political and the administrative system [20]. When it comes to e-Government, people often refer to e-Participation and, in partic‐ ular, the various possibilities that this new technology offers [24, 30]. Macintosh [12] argues that e-Participation has several overarching objectives next to these technologies, including engaging a wider audience, and providing relevant information in a format that is both more accessible and more understandable. However, transparency and accountability do not receive as much attention [13]. This article specifically focuses on these issues. In addition to the involvement of citizens in making demands and creating IT facilities for the government, citizens also take on the additional role of monitoring the development process and therefore the quality of the facilities. The question answered in this article is whether citizens are being sufficiently involved in monitoring the quality of the production processes and the implementation of facilities for e-Government. This would mean that citizens are involved during quality tests and especially during evaluations.